In looking quickly through the paper I noticed the minor points listed below -- you may wish to address them in advance of publication in ACPD -- but it is up to you.

l38 ‘shall inhibit’ — ‘will inhibit’ (I would have written ‘is likely to inhibit’) — there is a general problem (here and elsewhere in the paper) of using ’shall’ where ‘will’ corresponds to standard English.

l105: ‘has a high vertical resolution of 100m’ — this has been noted as confusing in reports on your other paper that has just been accepted for publication in ACP. ‘improves in regions where the stratification of the atmosphere changes’ — if this improvement in 'real' resolution is important then why not be more precise?

Figure 2: how carefully has this figure been prepared? Are there any idealised calculations behind it? Certainly when there is -ve stratification anomaly associated with wave at tropopause level the tropopause will tend to be higher (and it will be correspondingly lower when there is a +ve stratification anomaly). More specifically you say 'As shown in Figure 2, the tropopause height, usually the coldest point in the uppermost troposphere, would vary zonally as a consequence of the idealized wave anomaly structure.' -- but what does 'As shown' mean? A couple of sentence of explanation would be helpful. You mention 'westward phase tilt' in the caption -- is that intended to be relevant or not? (It might be relevant to Fig 3c, for example, but I don't see much relevance to the other panels of Fig 3.

l283: ‘relative maximum in wave activity around the tropopause’ — for me it is important to remember that this is wave activity as measured by N^2 anomalies — if I was writing this I would have said that explicitly.

Both referees are agreed that the paper is now close to being suitable for publication and both have provided some non-negligible further comments and suggestions for minor revision. Please will you consider revising the paper further in the light of the referees' comments and provide a revised version of the paper, plus replies to the comments. I then hope to accept the paper for publication without further consultation with the referees.

My view is that you have responded adequately to all the referees’ comments, except, perhaps, to that regarding the El Nino signal. Both referees made comments on the removal of the El Nino signal — to both you have responded ‘In Section 3.3 a commend was made how large is the effect of the ENSO removal and an additional Figure was included in the Supplementary Information’.

You refer to this Figure (S5) in Section 3.2 and say ‘Only little temperature effects can be attributed to ENSO in the extra tropics (Figure S5).’ — but I’m not clear on the connection between Figure S5 and El Nino. There is no mention of El Nino in the caption, for example. Perhaps the point is that the means shown in this Figure do not have the El Nino signal removed and therefore show a strong warm signal in the E Pacific? Whatever the logic here, it should be clearly and explicitly explained.

Therefore please consider making a further change to the text to make all this clearer (or provide a response that gives reasons why no change is made).

In addition I spotted a number of minor problems as listed below under ‘Detailed comments’. I did not check the paper exhaustively so would not be surprised if there were other minor problems still lurking in the paper. Please check it again carefully before resubmission.

Detailed comments — line numbers refer to the version of the paper included in your response, not to the revised manuscript.

p7 l27: ‘Figures S3’ > ‘Figure S3’

p8 l17: ‘is import’ > ‘is important’

p8 l18: ‘Only little’ > ‘Only small’ would be clearer.

p9 l17: You don’t seem to have included a reference to Figure S6 in the text.

Given your further revisions I am pleased to accept your paper for publication in ACP.